In the title screen, the word "Bionic" is written with a metallic font. It's looking pretty good so far, but it could use a little more "oomph".

In order to make the metal look more reflective, I originally wanted to add white highlights along some of the edges. Unfortunately, since each 2x2 tile region is limited to 4 colors, I had no available colors left after drawing the sky and landscape gradients. I didn't want to compromise the quality of those gradients, so the highlights got the boot.

Then it occurred to me: what if I layered sprites on top of the background to get those highlights? Doing so would produce the result shown below:

What do you think? Does this seem like a reasonable way to go about it? Any other ideas?

Oh yes, you should do this. I use sprites + background to make the portraits in my game. In fact, a lot of those look like just straight lines. You could get away with using very little tiles to make these. I think it really does make it more metallic looking.

Thanks for the support! Cool, sounds like that idea's got the green light.

tokumaru wrote:

There seems to be less than 8 columns of sprites, so the sprite limit won't be a problem.

Good observation! I originally had the highlights running horizontally across the tops of the letters, but quickly realized the sprite limit would prohibit it. After switching to the vertical orientation, I think it looks much better. I love it when technical limitations foster creativity.

And yes, there are exactly 8 columns. If you look closely at the letter B, you'll notice a missing column of highlights. I originally had additional highlights immediately to the right of the two holes, but removed them to stay within the sprite limit. I don't think the omission is very noticeable, nor does it diminish the overall look.

Wow, figuring out a good sprite arrangement for the highlights was a pain. After shuffling some pixels around and exploiting the sprite V-flip bit, I managed to cram all the highlights into 6 unique tiles. A more optimal arrangement might be possible, but considering that the per-scanline sprite limit prohibits me from layering sprites on top of each other, I'm pleased with the results.

The colored boxes on the right half of the image indicate where each sprite goes. (There are 38 sprites total.) The red boxes indicate sprites that are flipped vertically.

Also, I went ahead and made the highlights thicker so they'd be more noticeable. The NES ain't about subtlety.

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